Samsung Galaxy S III

The most recent numbers show that Apple and Samsung account for nearly 99% of cell phone sales. That is an unbelievable feat in a market of so many competitors. We all know that Apple has a unique method of maintaining sales through its use of product and marketing differentiation and their closed hardware design. Samsung has an even harder time, as they compete in the open android market. Samsung took android to new heights with its Galaxy S line of phones. It was the highest rated phone of 2010. In 2011, Samsung did it again, releasing a highly improved successor to the Galaxy S line, the Galaxy II. This phone came in many suits and was well received by all, including more than a few Apple owners. Now it’s time to see if Samsung can go three for three and create the best phone of 2012.

So it’s been a long time coming, but the new phone from Samsung is finally here. There has been nearly as much speculation surrounding its release as there is when a new Apple product drops on the scene. For months now every scrap of information has been gone over with a fine toothed comb. We’ve heard things from the insane to the, hopefully, too mundane. We’ll see if the new Samsung Galaxy SIII is everything we all hoped it would be, or if like Apple, Samsung has allowed the rumor mill to make their new device something more than they are able to deliver.

The Screen

One of the biggest areas of conjecture before the release of the Galaxy SIII was the screen. Many have pegged it as a Super AMOLED+ running at 1920x1080 and measuring 4.8 diagonally. This was one of the major coups I was hoping for with this new phone, as they could claim to be the first full HD compliant phone to market and put an end to all of that Apple dominance. We got the size that everyone wanted, and we got the Super AMOLED+ screen. The only thing that Samsung couldn’t deliver on was the 1080P resolution. So, the phone market still hasn’t broken the 1080p barrier. By all accounts, the screen is very nice to behold, albeit at a lower resolution that we would have liked to see.

The Hardware

This was another of the areas closely watched by those who most enjoy the tech that goes into the latest smart phones. Here again many were anticipating Samsung using the Galaxy S III as a launching point for its newest Exynos CPU and GPU combination. It’s almost a shame that so many can feel disappointed that the Galaxy S III only includes a quad core Exynos running at 1.4ghz. The chip allegedly can throttle speed of any core at anytime, not requiring a drop to the whole die. Performance will no doubt be stellar, though it appears we must now wait for another release to see the best that Samsung currently has to offer. Rumors remain of a after the original launch of a modified SIII supporting the new hardware.

No 14MP camera here. Rather an 8mp model that shoots 1080P and a 1.9MP model in front that can shoot 720p video. There are supposed to be some features that will set these cameras apart from the masses, but the only one mentioned so far uses the front camera to track your eye movements and keep the phone from going to sleep while you are reading.

There are some neat touches with the phone that shouldn’t be overlooked. The new ultra low power Bluetooth will be nice when more devices use it. NFC may be the way of the future, but I haven’t seen a single store which utilizes the tech themselves. These are both worthy features that require adoption by other parties before they become useful. Let’s hope they do. Another bit of tech in the SIII that won’t require changes is the ability to bond Wi-Fi channels. This should give the bandwidth available to the phone over Wi-Fi a boost.

Conclusion

It’s still not out in the US and it’s still too early to tell what features and even hardware we’ll actually see when it launches here. There have been some disheartening changes made to several high profile phones of late between their euro launch spec and what we see here. Two of the major examples of this are the Note and the One X. Both are much more capable devices in their Euro form. I am not clear if this is carrier based or some other marketing maneuver, but here’s hoping the Galaxy SIII makes it to our shores in its current form. For many, even that will be considered a disappointment